native dynamic drop down functionality- Card View & Reports

Eric Godlewski

I know there are many different discussions requesting dynamic dropdown functionality native in Smartsheet without a third party solution but I feel the need to start another to emphasize the importance.  I believe the need makes even more sense with Card View functionality Smartsheet recently introduced…especially in an enterprise setting.  I’m not sure how votes are tallied but count mine (10 fold!) as well as many others in my organization for dynamic dropdown functionality (the need to centrally maintain drop downs that can accessed across multiple smartsheets via multiple users). 

 

The Card View functionality to the best of my knowledge is only available for drop down list columns.  For our large organization with multiple Smartsheet users the value of this functionality becomes frankly somewhat unusable when multiple team members (and members outside of our team) may be creating similar but different drop down entries that are viewed collectively as a team or an enterprise.  Yes, we can manually try to teach users to utilize the same drop downs we dictate but that takes away the value of using an automated tool that costs our organization money.  Dynamic dropdowns would be great for maintaining a uniform list of project names in a portfolio, names of multiple enterprise teams, uniform project statuses, assigned team resources, and many others.  Any user could leverage these centrally maintained lists in their individual Smartsheet columns ensuring an accurate/uniform view in Card lanes.

 

Centrally maintained Dynamic drop down lists obviously benefits more than just card view…it benefits reporting in general especially from an enterprise perspective.   We highly utilize reports for our team but to make them valuable outside of a small team to the enterprise as a whole we must be assured we are providing management apples to apples report vs potentially apples to oranges across multiple teams.  Controlling the dropdown lists centrally would let us exercise thoughtful control of what we are looking for in reports and to be tracked in our projects as an enterprise.  

 

I really hope this functionality is considered as our large IT organization is seriously considering using Smartsheet as an enterprise tool.  Currently my team has been the guinea pigs for experimenting with Smartsheet and I think I’d have a tough time selling the benefits to our larger organization if we can’t have some uniform control of the data we are viewing/reporting on an enterprise level. 

 

Thanks for considering and we love your product as a whole!

Benjamin Walker

I think Templates might be a way you could solve the problem you describe here. They can have the dropdown vlaues already set and be shared through workspaces to whomever needs to create uniform sheets.

Marcella McMahon1

We could have sold this to many of our consulting customers if Smartsheet had the dynamic dropdowns.  Smartsheet is missing out on so much business because this is lacking.  

 

I love Smartsheets, but I see so many new features but two things are glaringly missing. 1. Dynamic Dropdowns and 2. Timer for roll-up billing per person.

 

I'm not part of our technology team, I'm run instructional design, so I appologize if I'm not clearly describing the needs of our organization and our customers.

Marcella McMahon1

Also, the template feature Benjamin describes doesn't really work for large organizations or across many sheets.

 

Eric Godlewski

Agreed, templates Benjamin mentioned as a solution do not really work across large organizations. Also defeats the purpose of "dynamic" capabilities. 

 

Seems like a lot of folks need this functionality. 

Kennedy Stomps

Hi Eric (and all)-- This is is something that our Development team is considering and I've passed on your feedback. This will help us prioritize as we plan new features. Thanks for your input!